Over the last month I've learned a very valuable but time-consuming, somewhat expensive, and frustrating experience regarding trademarks, brand names, and company organization names as it relates to fictional writing.

Just when I was ready to hit the final button and have the front and back cover and the full start to finish manuscript ready for press and picking a publication date, I decided I better check on some proper names, trade names, and other identifying names that I had created fictitiously to see if they might infringe, violate, or otherwise cause legal problems with existing names that are similar or the same.

So, when I fed portions of my manuscript to Google Gemini Pro, it came back flagging several dozen items. It's beyond the scope of this blog post to go into the full details but just to know that many of the names are either identical phonetically similar, or contain portions that were in direct conflict with active trademarks, brand names, and company names despite my best effort to randomly pick things that would be unique and fictitious.

Many months ago I did hire the services of an intellectual property attorney to give me advice in a general fashion and on specific items that I was most worried about. Furthermore I did my own searching at the US patent and trademark office website using the tools available there which caught a number of items on my own before I even talked to the attorney. While that certainly cleared up many items such as making sure that you don't use the names of real famous people and that you cannot use song lyrics (even if just a short excerpt) there's no way both the attorney and I could have found everything unless I paid him high four figures to low five figures to read the whole book and then write advice.

So, I rolled up my sleeves and spent the better part of three weekends doing more in-depth one trade name at a time using Google Gemini Pro to reconcile any problems and come up with safe alternatives. The bottom line: I learned as a fictional author to be safe and save yourself a lot of last minute headaches cost and problems is to generalize as much as possible fictitious names that you’d would otherwise want to use with capital letters in your fictitious mark. When you have almost 100,000 words the chances are high that something will be in possible violation. As a first time author I just didn't want to take any chances hence the delay and the extra work and expense to fix everything up.

For aspiring first time fiction authors I have three general pieces of advice based on this endeavor.

1. Use your favorite generative AI chatbot (mine is Google Gemini Pro) and one term at a time create a detailed prompt where you ask it to investigate the entire internet and all available databases (including foreign organizations) to see if you have any direct conflicts. Use Deep Research – Thinking mode for this be patient while it takes several minutes to finish, each term.

2. Use generalized terms as much as possible. For example, instead of saying XYZ satellite where XYZ could be a proper name or an already trademarked name, just say something general like government satellite and then put a hyphenated number as one example on how to stay safe in general. As an added bonus that makes your book future proof such that if somebody comes along and has a trademark later on after the book is published, or there's a change in nomenclature for the technology describing your fictitious items or service, you've used a general marks and so the age of the book on the market will not be a detractor to the storyline.

3. While a brief consultation with an intellectual property attorney is advised, they are very expensive. It's best if you do your own homework before consulting the lawyer using the US Patent and trademark Office search tool with your key phrases or keywords that are fictitious from your novel. Then after you do step one above - which is work with your favorite chatbot tool for research - go back to US Patent and Trademark Office and double check it to make sure it didn't miss anything.

These setbacks will cost me about $1,000, the aforementioned weekends of devoted rework, and will probably delay release by 3 to 4 months. But at least I know for the next time I write a book how to handle this tricky situation.